THE policy of nuclear deterrence is “morally awesome to support”, the former Bishop of Oxford Lord Harries said in the House of Lords last week — but he did so “with moral fear and spiritual trembling” and with deep misgivings about cyberwarfare.
He also quoted the late President Reagan: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
In the two-hour defence policy debate on Thursday of last week, Lord Harries, a member of the armed forces in the 1950s — after Sandhurst and before theological college — said that such a policy “can be supported only in the belief that it is in principle fundamentally stable”. He said that “the moral principles which apply to the use of all armed force are equally applicable in a nuclear age: I mean the principles of discrimination and proportion.”
He was equally concerned for international relations. “I believe that the major threat at the moment is not the nuclear weapons of another state, but their capacity for cyberwarfare. Nuclear weapons are no deterrent to another country that has the capacity to render our whole command and control system inoperative. Although I continue to support our deterrence posture, with its nuclear component, my main concern is in relation to our ability to protect our own command and control structure and our capacity to deter other countries from disrupting it.”
Baroness Smith of Newnham (Liberal Democrat) referred to the “incredibly important contribution” that Lord Harries had made. “Our nuclear posture was initially determined in a period of balance: the Cold War, when mutually assured destruction meant that it was unlikely that any side would use a nuclear weapon. They had their deterrent function. In the current world, we face not just state-based threats but threats from non-state actors; not just conventional threats but cyber and hybrid threats.”
She asked: “Who is banging the drum to deal with hybrid threats and cyber, and to ensure that we have a fully fledged deterrent alongside our nuclear deterrent?”
In summing up for the Government, Lord Coaker, a defence minister, said: “Lord Harries was right to raise the issues of cyberwarfare, information and disinformation, and the resilience of the population, which are all important matters. They are new aspects of war, especially cyberwarfare. . .
“With his knowledge of local government, my noble friend has much more experience than me in the resilience of the population and in civil emergencies and defence, which we will have to address. When I look back in history, I see that the resilience of the British people has been immense when they have had to resist the threat of attack, or have indeed been attacked. The whole area of cyberwarfare and information is important.”